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A Sugar High?

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesSigns and confetti on the floor after the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.

Democrats are riding a wave of enthusiasm. Republicans are dreading a Romney wipeout.

President Obama has experienced a post-convention bump, whereas Mitt Romney saw none. A Tuesday Gallup report showed that Obama’s lead over Romney increased 5 points after the Democratic convention. That result echoed findings from a CNN/ORC International poll released Monday.

This may be in part because Democrats bolstered their convention by huge ad spending to maximize exposure. As the Wesleyan Media Project pointed out:

During the Aug. 26 to Sept. 8 period, Obama and his allies aired 40,000 ads on broadcast and national cable television, the vast majority of which were paid for by the Obama campaign. By comparison, Romney and his allies aired 18,000 ads on broadcast and national cable television during that same time period.

There’s more. New fund-raising numbers released this week found that President Obama outraised Romney in August for the first time in months. This won’t make up for the mischief I anticipate from the Republican’s cash-soaked “super PACs,” but it’s an important turn.

And Bill “Big Dog” Clinton has hit the campaign trail in critical swing states and expanded on his devastating convention speech. Clinton is performing a critical function: attacking the faulty math of the ticket that just added a “numbers man,” as Time magazine called Paul Ryan. Clinton’s assault on the Republicans’ arithmetic continues a well-worn political strategy and one that the Obama campaign used incredibly effectively: attack your opponent’s strengths. Clinton is a master at this, smiling in your face and punching you in the gut.

Needless to say, Democrats are feeling good. Republicans, not so much.

There seems to be a sense, even among many of Romney’s supporters, that he’s making too many unforced errors and offering too few specifics.

The Democrats, it seems to us, made better use of their convention than the Republicans made of theirs. The Republican message, especially in the most-watched addresses, seemed less coordinated, deliberate, and focused. Republicans spent too much time explaining what a nice guy Romney is and how happy he is about female empowerment, and not enough time explaining how he would improve the national condition.

I agree with this assessment. The Republican convention was a mess. Ann Romney began her speech by saying “I want to talk to you about love,” only to be followed by the brash, narcissistic Chris Christie who said that we have “become paralyzed by our desire to be loved.”

Talk about whiplash. And it didn’t stop there.

Clint Eastwood, in his now infamous empty-chair “speech,” made a strange reference to the war in Afghanistan. Speaking to an invisible Obama, he said

I know you were against the war in Iraq, and that’s O.K. But you thought the war in Afghanistan was O.K. You know, I mean — you thought that was something that was worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how they did there for the 10 years.

Of course, Eastwood was followed by Romney, who didn’t even mention the war. When Fox News’s Brett Baier asked him to explain this omission, Romney dug the hole deeper with a nonsensical and arguably offensive rationale:

When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important, and I described in my speech my commitment to a strong military, unlike the president’s decision to cut our military.

Huh? A would-be commander in chief doesn’t think an active war is “important”?

Even worse, on Tuesday the Romney campaign jumped the gun — and skirted the truth — in a highly inappropriate attack on the Obama administration over the anti-American hostilities in Libya and Egypt. In a statement, Romney said:

I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.

He was referring to the embassy statement condemning an American-made Web film denouncing Islam that was the catalyst for the violence. However, the embassy’s statement was released in an effort to head off the violence, not after the attacks, as Mr. Romney’s statement implied.

Oops.

The Romney camp should learn a lesson from journalists: wait until you have the facts. It’s better to be second and right than first and wrong. Knee-jerk reactions can make you look like a jerk.

But after offending the British on his Olympics trip and labeling Russia our “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Mitt was already well on his way to proving that he is a diplomatic disaster. This week the Russian president, Vladimir Putin thanked Romney for the label, saying that it had helped Russia because it had “proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems.”

Yeah, thanks Mitt.

But perhaps Romney’s biggest mistake has been his allergy to specificity on his plans for the economy even though he’s running on a promise to reform and recharge it.

It’s one thing to identify a problem, say you care about it, and even list some steps you would take to address it. It’s another thing to convince people that you can really do the job. Many people wonder, and not without reason, whether any president can really do this job. So what else might you do? I suggest that your focus on the economy and jobs would be strengthened by more detailed discussions of policies you would enact, and also of related issues, notably Obamacare and Medicare. The assertion that you are more competent than President Obama strikes many people as merely that — an assertion. It would be supported by your speaking in more detail about a range of financial issues.

This is a major miscalculation by Romney: that somehow he can simply run out the clock without ever providing specifics (or those tax returns for that matter), and anti-Obama sentiment will magically deliver him the White House. Fear is a great political motivator, but confidence and security also play a role in presidential politics.

The Romney campaign sent out a memo on Monday to “Interested Parties”meant to assuage fears. The first paragraph began:

Don’t get too worked up about the latest polling. While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly.

This sounds like one of those affirmations that you tape to your bathroom mirror and repeat every morning when your life is in the doldrums and you’re in need of direction.

But self-reassurance can’t compensate for self-destructiveness. Those of us who have been forced to reckon with our own mistakes know that well.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.